Jogesh Pati

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jogesh C. Pati (born 1937) is a physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, the joint recipient of the 2000 Dirac Medal.

Pati has made pioneering contributions to the notion of a unification of elementary particles – quarks and leptons – and of their gauge forces force: weak, electromagnetic, and strong. His formulation, carried out in collaboration with Abdus Salam, of the original gauge theory of quark–lepton unification, and their resulting insight that violations of baryon and lepton numbers, especially those that would manifest in proton decay, are likely consequences of such a unification, provide cornerstones of modern particle physics today. The suggestions of Pati and Salam of the symmetry of SU(4)–color, left–right symmetry, and of the associated existence of right-handed neutrinos, now provide some of the crucial ingredients for understanding the observed masses of the neutrinos and their oscillations. For his pioneering contributions to a “Quest for Unification” he received the Dirac Medal for the year 2000 (with Howard Georgi and Helen Quinn).